Society

Thursday

Peter Jones

Let the right ones in

As the UK prepares for Brexit into the big wide world outside, it has been pointed out that the Foreign Office is sadly lacking in people with hard experience of that world, and even more lacking in people from that world. But if the Romans can do it, surely we can too. Whatever else the Romans were, they were not hung up about race. That did not mean they admired all foreigners. The satirist Juvenal was cynical about the Greeks, who would happily turn into anything you wanted them to at the drop of a hat; and doctors observed that different environments produced not only different physical make-ups but also different mentalities

The Spectator

Barometer | 29 September 2016

Lynch lore John McDonnell refused to apologise for a 2014 interview in which he called for former employment minister Esther McVey to be ‘lynched’. — Several Lynches have been credited for giving the term to the language. One was Charles Lynch (1736-96), a farmer, community leader and, remarkably, a Quaker from Lynchburg, Virginia (a town named after his brother John). Suspects were supposed to be sent 200 miles to Williamsburg for trial, but during the war of independence the journey became very difficult. Instead, Lynch and his neighbours dispensed justice themselves — although they did try to do it according to the law. The richer list McDonnell also said: ‘Our

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 29 September 2016

Mathias Döpfner, the extremely tall, extremely intelligent head of Axel Springer, is unusual in the generally conformist German business elite because he is not an unqualified believer in the German economic model. I have known him slightly for about 20 years and have always been interested by his questing, speculative mind. We have had conversations about the freer, Anglosphere model of economic life which he admires. Although he is not anti-EU — that is still almost against the law in Germany — he is sceptical of its direction. Now he has blasphemed in the EU’s main church in Britain — the Financial Times — by telling the paper that within

Toby Young Toby Young

I know an anti-Tory pact won’t work

I appeared on Radio 4 with Shirley Williams recently and as we were leaving I asked her if she thought Labour might split if Jeremy Corbyn were re-elected. Would the history of the SDP, which she helped set up in 1981, put off Labour moderates from trying something similar? She thought it might, but suggested an alternative, which was a ‘non-aggression pact’ between all the left-of-centre parties. ‘We can unite around the issues we agree on and get the Tories out,’ she said. I didn’t have time to explore this in detail, but I think she meant some kind of tactical voting alliance whereby supporters of Labour, the Lib Dems,

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 29 September 2016

Q. When an invitation to shoot arrives in the autumn, I have a sense of both excitement and dread. The dread is because at the end of the day, metropolitans request that the guns must each tip to the gamekeeper a sum far higher than would be the norm for traditional country folk. Indeed, in a ritual of trumping one another they often double the going rate. The shoot owner rarely intervenes since he is obviously keen for his keeper to receive as much as possible. It leaves someone like me (I am 20 and without a City salary) in an awkward situation. Either I put myself very much out

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Pens, sex and potatoes

I hoped that Bronte would be filled with Victorian writers licking ink off their fingers and bitching about Mrs Gaskell being a third-rate hack; but it is not to be. (Do not think I am vulgar. My description is accurate. Wuthering Heights is a rude novel, and Jane Eyre is worse. St John Rivers, its Christian Grey, is surely a Spectator subscriber). It is, instead, a finely wrought and glossy restaurant off Trafalgar Square, designed, I suspect, for advertising executives. It used to be the Strand Dining Rooms but it died and now there’s this. It is named for Horatio Nelson, the Duke of Bronte. His title, it is believed,

Dot Wordsworth

Ash

Home is where the heart is, but some poor languages have no word for ‘home’. For them, home is where the hearth is. The Spaniards have a proverb (of course) on the matter: El sol es hogar de los pobres, ‘The sun is hearth and home for the poor’, since they can afford no other fire than the winter sun. My columnar neighbour, Peter Jones, touches on this hearth in his wonderfully entertaining new book, Quid Pro Quo, What the Romans Really Gave the English Language. I found it fun to turn from one entry to a connecting entry and read it like a game of hare and hounds. For

Taki

High life | 29 September 2016

Although my birthday was in August, I chose the rather melancholy autumnal moment of September to celebrate it — mourn it, rather. There are no ifs or buts about it, turning 80 is like that final beautiful gleam of light just before you lose consciousness during a boxing bout. The beauty of adolescence is that one doesn’t know why one’s angry or unhappy. The tragedy of old age is that one does. I was a lucky young man. I was often angry but hardly ever unhappy. That is why The Catcher in the Rye was my favourite book, Tender Is the Night and The Sun Also Rises included. Holden saw

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 29 September 2016

I stood in front of the mirror in the £61-a-night hotel room in Paddington, buttoned my polyester dinner jacket and straightened my bow tie. The last time I’d worn a dinner jacket was nearly three years earlier, I remembered, at the Cigar Smoker of the Year. What a night that was. I dug through the pockets in case there was any MDMA still hanging about. I found a dog-end and a 100mg tablet of Indian-made Viagra. I took a selfie in the mirror, picked up the gift-wrapped birthday present and card, switched off the studio-quality strip light, and closed the door behind me. As I tripped down the front steps

Melissa Kite

Real life | 29 September 2016

‘If you ask me,’ said the builder boyfriend, watching me hobble down the street as we set off for an early evening bite at the kebab shop, ‘you’re laminitic. ‘Think about it. You’ve got ludicrously small feet. They’re useless. Look at them. I’m surprised you can even balance on them. And you’ve gained a bit of weight, by your own admission. You’re like a thoroughbred horse. You’re carrying too much weight for your funny little shallow feet and you’ve gone lame. You’ve got laminitis. If you’re not careful, your pedal bones will rotate and then we’ll have to put you down. You need to get some weight off. Soaked hay

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 29 September 2016

Every threatened species of wildlife can count on the friendship of a member of the British royal family. There are few causes that royals can espouse without risking political controversy, but wildlife conservation is seen as one. This may be why they are ready to speak out for any newt, butterfly, or other creature facing the risk of extinction. Prominent among them is Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, who is an active campaigner for the greatest of them all, the African elephant, and last week made a strong appeal for a total ban by Britain on trade in ivory. As Cites (the 180-nation Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species)

Robin Oakley

The turf | 29 September 2016

There are few more compulsive reads in racing than the Kingsley Klarion, the in-house journal of Mark Johnston’s Middleham racing operation, which runs under the slightly ambiguous slogan ‘Always trying’. It is ambiguous not because anyone doubts that every Johnston runner is out on the racecourse striving to be first past the post but because the combatirobin ove Johnston is never short of an opinion, and sometimes those opinions have other senior figures in racing spitting feathers. Once of an opinion, he does not mind whose patience he tries. Last Saturday Mark produced what was for me the training performance of the season when, in a stiff wind, his 25-1

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 29 September 2016

TGR’s rubber bridge club is a bit like the set of your favourite soap. You have the regulars, of varying abilities and temperaments. You have the stars. You have the guest appearances, characters who come and go and shake up the cocktail. And then you have the total strangers, who walk in from nowhere and either last or are quickly written out. Some become friends, some you admire, and a tiny minority you absolutely loathe! They are the ones who whine nasally and continuously at every perceived mistake partner makes, want to control every bidding sequence and every defence, try and hog as much as possible, cry ‘bully’ when anyone

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 29 September 2016

Home Sir Michael Fallon, the Defence Secretary, said that Britain would oppose attempts to create an EU army, as it would ‘undermine’ Nato. Forecasts for British economic growth in 2016 collated by the Treasury were revised from 1.5 to 1.8 per cent, the level expected in June, before the EU referendum. Mathias Döpfner, the chief executive of Axel Springer, said that leaving the European Union would make Britain ‘better off than continental Europe’ within five years. Scotland began importing shale gas from the United States. Fourteen candidates are to stand in the by-election at Witney on October 20 to replace David Cameron as MP, including one from the Bus-Pass Elvis

Doc

2280: Acorns

The unclued lights are of a kind, verifiable in Brewer. Ignore one apostrophe.   Across   1     Top for one dining in Cornwall? (7) 11     Rainy weather trapped everyone, in case (6) 12     Chosen the same, leaderless (7) 14     Old sweetheart at short race track (5) 16     Hang around. Look — it’s the Queen! (6) 17     Empty pub about noon (6) 19     Good French is written which I can follow (9) 21     Unpaid debts needing every attention after swapping sides (7) 24     Excavators question loveless muleteers (9) 29     Gone is a resolve to worry greatly (7) 32     Tricky game

Terence Blacker

Of rats and men | 29 September 2016

‘I really, really hate rats,’ Sir David Attenborough has boasted. ‘If a rat appears in a room, I have to work hard to prevent myself from jumping on the nearest table.’ But why? Sir David’s answers are disappointingly feeble. A rat had once run across his bed. They live in sewers. They show no fear and ‘invade the area where you think you are boss’. It is odd that a naturalist can hate an animal for simply doing what animals do — survive — and rather better than most. But almost everything about how humans view rats is illogical. Any social historian looking to prove that an ounce of primitive

Doc

to 2277: Royalty

The theme word is KING and the pairs are 4/41, 14/1A, 19/27, 34/16 and 38/24.   First prize C.V. Clark, London WC1 Runners-up C.S.G. Elengorn, Enfield, Middlesex; Jacqui Sohn, Gorleston, Norfolk

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Eddie Howe for England

The name of Jozef Venglos won’t mean much to most of us apart from a few Aston Villa completists with long memories, and possibly Prince William, though by all accounts the amiable Czech is a pretty stand-up guy. He was also the first foreigner to take charge of an English top-flight club. It wasn’t much of a success, and his year at Villa (1990-91) left them two places above the relegation zone. (Sound familiar?) Now of course you can’t move for foreign managers: on the style pages, the food pages, the news pages — and jabbing each other in the technical areas. It’s not a great time for English managers

Ed Cumming

Croatia

Advocates of New Zealand often boast that the country is like Britain was in the 1950s. This is all well and good if 1950s Britain is where you want to go on holiday, but it’s not for everyone. In fact, some might argue the main purpose of the past half-century has been to make Britain less like Britain was in the 1950s. What, then, are the options for those who would rather go on holiday to the Italian Riviera of the 1950s? The answer, it turns out, is Croatia, which has pleasant weather late into the autumn, idyllic coastlines and a laidback glamour that seems like a distant memory on